A review on assembly sequence planning and assembly line balancing optimisationusing soft computing approaches

摘要

Assembly optimisation activities occur across development and production stagesof manufacturing goods. Assembly Sequence Planning (ASP) and Assembly LineBalancing (ALB) problems are among the assembly optimisation. Both of theseactivities are classified as NP-hard. Several soft computing approaches usingdifferent techniques have been developed to solve ASP and ALB. Although theseapproaches do not guarantee the optimum solution, they have been successfullyapplied in many ASP and ALB optimisation works. This paper reported the surveyon research in ASP and ALB that use soft computing approaches for the past10years. To be more specific, only Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem(SALBP) is considered for ALB. The survey shows that three soft computingalgorithms that frequently used to solve ASP and ALB are Genetic Algorithm, AntColony Optimisation and Particle Swarm Optimisation. Meanwhile, the research inASP and ALB is also progressing to the next level by integration of assemblyoptimisation activities across product development stages.